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Sunday, August 31, 2014

It's been a busy week of writing and I hope you are enjoying this holiday weekend.

Most of the week was spent on the cult of compliance and police violence. I started with a piece on CNN on 4 police killings of people with mental health issues. I argued that we need to think about psychiatric disability - disability comes with protections and the need for accommodation - rather than illness. As usual, I added some blog followups.

I also wrote a post about four stories of police violence for "Living while Black." Black men attacked for sitting, not walking, raising hands, and keeping hands in pockets. One of the story also involves autism. Thank you to everyone who read it here or one of the sites on which I shared it.

I published an essay called "Save the Dissertation" (it saved me) on Chronicle Vitae, with a followup on the blog. There's a lot of talk in Higher Ed about reshaping graduate education, and no doubt a lot of reform is needed. But for me, the dissertation process, in all its turmoil, is how we become scholars. If we want to come up with new ways to do this, that's fine. We don't, however, get to test it out on grad students. Senior scholars at R1 schools - you go first. Then apply for grants, sabbaticals, chairs, etc. with the results and let us know what happens.

I had two essays. The fun one was onHuffington Post and was about my approach to "parenting against the grain." My daughter got an Avengers backpack. Some boys doubted it was hers. I also wrote a blog about my son and gender norming, and the complexities there (due to Down syndrome).

I also published a book review. It's got 2 errors I'm trying to have fixed. Overall, publishing blogs on HuffPo has been fun, but I'm not sure I get a lot more out of it than writing here. More on that next week.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Here are four stories literally just from last night (they happened at different times, but made news yesterday). They illustrate the way racism enables and is enabled by the cult of compliance. The cult provides an intersectional lens in which race and class dominate the middle, with disability not far behind. When these categories overlap in a single individual, trouble beckons.Incident 1: Sitting while black in a public space.

The African-American man was sitting outside a store, waiting for his kids to get out of school. The store clerk got nervous - a black man sitting! For ten minutes! - so he called the police. When the police arrived, they demanded his ID. He didn't comply:

The man in the video tells the officer he was sitting in front of the store for 10 minutes as he waited for his kids to get out of school, and that the area is public and he had a right to sit there.
“The problem was —” the female officer begins.
“The problem is I’m black,” the man fires back. “It really is, because I’m not sitting there with a group of people. I’m sitting there by myself. By myself, not causing a problem.”
Eventually a second male officer approaches the man in the video and attempts to restrain him.
“I’ve got to go get my kids,” the man tells the second officer, pulling his arm away. “Please don’t touch me.”
“You’re going to go to jail then,” the second officer says.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” the man replies.
At this point, both officers grab the man.
“Come on brother,” the man says, “This is assault.”
“I’m not your brother,” the second officer replies. “Put your hands behind your back otherwise it’s going to get ugly.”
Eventually the officers start to cuff the man and he drops his cellphone and the video goes black.
“I haven’t done anything wrong!” we hear the man yell. “Can somebody help me? That’s my kids, right there! My kids are right there!”
“Put your hands behind your back!” the male officer screams.

Then they tased him.

UPDATES (8/29/14) - More on the Chris Lollie story from the City Pages in the Twin Cities. Charges has been dropped. Police defended their actions. Lollie is filing a complaint and considering a lawsuit. Lawyers weigh in. MY QUESTION - Who called it in at the bank. Do you use that bank? Can you talk to the manager?

According to Yearby, her son was standing in front of their apartment on Southampton Road minding his own business when two officers on patrol approached him and questioned him. The officers later said they thought he looked suspicious.
"I ran outside and the police pushed me back and I asked him, 'what was going on?' and [the officer] was like 'I asked your son to take his hands out of his pockets,'" recalled Vicky Yearby.
Yearby said she and a neighbor told the officers her son was mentally disabled but they ignored them and continued to yell at Isaac Yearby and frighten him.
Video captured from the Taser camera shows Yearby removed his hands from his pockets then flailed his arms. Seconds later the Taser fired and he fell to the ground. The lawsuit claimed the fall caused Isaac Yearby to suffer seizures which continued periodically.

And of course, there's no accountability.

College Park Police Chief Ron Fears declined an interview but city spokesman Gerald Walker issued a statement which reads, "The City of College Park's Police Department respects the rights of all citizens and visitors, and pledges to maintain a safe community."
It goes on, "[t]he situation in 2011 with Mr. Yearby was unfortunate; however, Judge Marvin Shoob's summary exonerated our officers and their actions. The College Park Police Department continues to protect and serve, and hopes for the best for everyone involved in this case."

There was a foot chase and the man, an African American named Gregory Towns, was exhausted, but caught. He wouldn't walk, so they started tasing him, driving him with electric shocks as if he were an animal. He died.

But Police Benevolent Association lawyers representing Weems continued to insist that the officer’s actions did not cause Towns to die.
Attorney Dale Preiser issued a statement saying that the “use of drive stun to gain compliance is permitted under federal and Georgia law

Read that again. Under federal and Georgia law, it's fine to use a taser to "gain compliance."

Incident 4 - Not Resisting While Black

Stop Trying to Take My Gun!" The cop shouted this as he was attacking a black man with his hands up.

Cameras have lately been touted as a major solution to police brutality. And they are definitely a HUGE help. What's interesting to me, and upsetting, is the way that police are beginning to game their speech so that they'll have an excuse for the camera.

As we've seen in the Michael Brown case, "he was reaching for my gun" is the excuse that police use when they shoot someone unarmed. Here's a case where the video catches the whole thing.

All the criminal charges against Marcus Jeter have been dismissed, and two Bloomfield police officers have been indicted for falsifying reports, and one of them, for assault.
A third pleaded guilty early on to tampering. It's all thanks to those dashcam tapes. It's the video that prosecutors say they never saw when the pursued criminal charges against 30 year-old Marcus Jeter . In the video, his hands were in the air. He was charged with eluding police, resisting arrest and assault. One officer in the video can be seen throwing repeated punches.

His hands are in the air, because he's a black man, and he knows that if he looks threatening, he can be shot with impunity.

The video, starting around 2:30, is terrible. Listen to the cop screaming, "Stop Resisting! Stop Resisting! Why are you trying to touch my fucking gun! Get off my gun!"

They are faking resistance for the camera.

Good news: The cops have been charged. There may be justice in this case.Bad news: How many other people have gone to jail while the cops screamed, "Stop resisting!" to an unarmed man with his hands up. They are learning to play for their cameras.

Here's one finallink. This is a white man in Florida. His son, who is autistic, was pulled over and the father drove to help, but the cops didn't want his help. This is their command training - a civilian interfering is a threat to their command presence, so they don't allow it. The man calmly asserts his rights, he tells the officers that the boy is autistic. If you watch the video, you can see them look at the camera being held by the son, move to block a little. They grab him, throw him to the ground, tase him, and shout, "GET ON THE GROUND! STOP RESISTING." That, they hope, will provide them with the excuse they need.

Of course they charged him with resisting arrest.

The Cult of Compliance provides our intersectional lens. We know these cases are wrong. We know about them because of video, because of disability, because of luck. Most of the victims are people of color. Most of the victims never get any publicity.

Here's one vital lesson for white folks like me. When Michael Brown was killed, a lot of white people, mostly but not exclusively conservatives, said, "He should have just complied when the police told him to get out of the road." Maybe. Maybe it would have saved him. But as we can see here, there is no correct behavior that will protect a black man from police brutality. All behaviors - standing, sitting, walking, not walking, showing your hands, hands in your pockets - are suspect.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The boy came down the hall just as I was arriving at preschool with my daughter, Ellie. In a voice filled with excitement, she said, "Michael [not his real name], come look at my new backpack! It's the Avengers!" Indeed it was, or at least the four male heroes. Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and the Hulk, in vivid color, charging forward to fight evildoers.Michael responded with far too much skepticism for a 5-year-old boy. "You mean, you like Avengers? Or is that your brother's backpack?"Ellie completely missed it. "No," she said, "My brother got Minions. I got Avengers!" Then she raised her arms in the air, blasting laser beams out of her hands at the bad guys, and ran off to her classroom. Evil doers, beware.

In the essay, I talk about parenting against the grain. It's not enough, I argue, to just provide choice, because all of society is telling children that they must conform, conform, conform. The process of gender norming accelerates once they start school. There is no free choice. Instead, we push gently against that dominant message, hoping to create enough space for Ellie to choose whatever she likes.

The clever reader will have noticed, "My brother got Minions." I've been repeatedly asked - what about boys? Do you push Nico towards Hello Kitty or whatever? Do you push boys against the grain too?

Off to school, backpacks rampant!

These are good questions. I, like my questioners, have the sense that a lot of people push girls towards boy stuff and push boys towards boy stuff too. Boy stuff is powerful! Girls wearing boy clothes are powerful! Boys wearing girl clothes ...?

The lack of balance reflects and intensifies the patriarchal nature of our society, rather than fighting it. On the other hand, I could never advise a parent to push a boy into a dress, because that's not a gentle parenting against the grain. That's trying to smash the barriers. The problem is that a girl in "boy clothes" is pretty standard. A boy in a dress is a target. How far should we go?

I have two thoughts.

First - "Against the grain" is about gentle pushing, not creating targets for bullying. For boys, I think, the key is to focus on behaviors. Soraya Chemaly, one of my favorite writers, writes about these issues a lot, such as in "the problem with boys will be boys." We need to enable our sons, we need to push our sons, to exhibit behaviors not typically associated with masculinity. When they cry, we need to comfort and love, not say, "boys don't cry." I think that's what parenting a boy against the grain looks like.

Second - I have no idea what parenting a boy against the grain looks like, because Nico has Down syndrome.

People with Down syndrome are by no means immune to gender norming, but Nico has very limited verbal skills. He's not getting the kind of language replication of gender norms that our daughter has been showing for years now. "Pink is a girl's color," she says. Nico is as likely to pick a pink, blue, purple, or orange bowl. Moreover, when he picks a bowl, our goal is to get him to say a two-word sentence like "purple bowl," rather than focusing on gender issues.

Moreover, our primary goal with Nico is to find things that stimulate him, and then push push push for reaction, speech, enjoyment, development, engagement. So whatever it is that grabs him, that's what we go for. We have played with baby dolls. We have played with trucks. Right now, though, it's a pretty equal balance between Frozen and Minions. You should see him stand in the middle of the room, swooping his arms around, singing to "Let it Go." I think the gender issues are going fine there.

Would I send my son to school in a Hello Kitty backpack? Absolutely. But I confess I'd be very nervous about it. Nico is already so marked as "other" by his disability and we - teachers, parents, Nico, his friends, his sister - work very hard to make sure that otherness doesn't become too pronounced. If he had picked one with Elsa, he'd be wearing it today.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

"They reacted based upon the training that they've been given from the academy. We were thankful that no officer was injured from protecting themselves from risk of great bodily harm."

I have a new piece on CNN today about police killings of people with psychatric disabilities. I argue that we need to view these cases through the lens of disability, a word that carries with it certain rights, the principle of accommodation, and a different cultural response than "illness" (let alone crazy).

This is not like the case of Ezell Ford, where the man was unarmed. Each of these five featured a person with known psychiatric issues holding a weapon or seemingly holding a weapon. Each ended with in police gunfire. In only one case was there a highly dangerous weapon - a combat knife.

In my CNN piece, I describe the four most recent cases, four killings in two weeks. 2 in California, 1 in Arizona, and of course Kajieme Powell in St. Louis. I filed on Friday.

Joseph Jennings was struggling with depression and anxiety. He left a suicide note on facebook and swallowed pills, but he survived, in part thanks to two officers who showed up at the house in response to emergency calls. A few hours after leaving the hospital, though, Jennings seems to have gone to a Walmart, puchased a BB gun or water gun, and then got the cops called in order to commit suicide by cop.

The parents arrived in time to try and deescalate the situation, but were ordered back (warned they would get shot if they didn't comply). "Bag him," the officers said, and they started shooting. First beanbag rounds, then real bullets (at least 16 shots by report). Jennings died.

There are three stories here that I want to emphasize.

1) Jennings had just survived a suicide attempt and then was released from the hospital. We need better mental health care that is accessible and affordable for all.

2) I believe that quote with which I started this piece is true. Police followed their training. It is time to demand new training. CIT training alone isn't going to cut it, and I hope to have a piece on its limitations (Lawrence Carter-Long and I are working on something) within a week or two, but it's a start. We need to totally rethink the way that police engage with people who have disabilities of every sort.

And then we will all be safer, disabled and abled alike.

3) In the video (linked here) of the police chief, he says a slightly different version of the quote that everyone is running. He says, "We were thankful that no police officers or sheriff's deputies was injured while defending themselves from the potential threat of serious bodily harm.”

Look at that justifying language. There was a potential threat of serious bodily harm, the boy didn't comply, and so the police were justified in their actions. Except there wasn't really a threat, since he had a BB gun, his parents were there (the dad was about to tackle him to take him down, he was in arms reach).

According to this police officer, just a potential threat justifies deadly force, and surviving a non-existent but potential threat is something to be thankful about.
We are all in danger. When the police think we are dangerous, whether we are or not, they believe themselves to be justified in using lethal force.

Now I am a middle class white guy. I'm not likely to be seen as dangerous, unless my behavior turns erratic due to any number of factors - alcohol, illness, confusion. So my personal stake is pretty low. As we've seen in Missouri, any black body, especially male, is regarded as a threat by police. The potential threat is always there, so they can always use lethal force and justify it.

A known-disabled-mind, in a way that is similar, though not tied to centuries of institutional racism, when acting in an "erratic" (that's a cop incident-report word) fashion, also raises the "potential threat" level.

And when, like Kajieme Powell, you have a black body with a psychiatric disability, there's basically no hope.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Today in Vitae I have a piece that runs a bit against the grain of my other writing, at least on the surface. I believe we need to do a lot of things differently in terms of graduate education. I believe in change because the status quo - long graduate trainings, little professional experience, the enduring belief in the meritocracy - these things enable adjunctification and the damaging aspects of the academic prestige economy.

But I love scholarship.

I wrote the first draft of today's essay in mid-June. I was neck-deep in copy-edits, going through my 90000 word book (a pretty standard length, for those readers not in higher ed), line by line, working closely with a smart and meticulous copy editor from Penn State Press.

A few days before, I had spoken to my mother, also an academic (yes, I'm one of those kids). She was just trying to get the shape of a new project, thinking about how to craft the book.

And just before that, I had read a chapter draft from a friend. The chapter was packed with new information to me, but it still needed some conceptual shaping. It was a gorgeous work-in-progress, with the work so visible to the reader, but with plenty left to do.

And I thought, I love research.

As you'll see from the essay my road through graduate school was never smooth. What I leave out from my narrative is a year of writers block. I had a first marriage and she left me on Friday and I mostly lost the ability to write. I found it again while in the archives. But even before that my road was rocky and my current position as a working professor was never assured - because it's not assured for anybody. But for all the things I might change in graduate school, the process of the dissertation, no matter how hard it was (and it was very hard), is not really one of them.

Having recently read the MLA Report, I thought - yes, we might be able to make a stripped down degree and award PhDs - but right now, the way we train scholars is through the dissertation process. There might be a better way. We could definitely build new patterns of collaboration, new ways to publish, all sorts of different kinds of approaches to respond to the shifting nature of the publication economy and academic hiring practices, and so forth. The dissertation could be shorter, maybe, or more of a draft towards a book and less of a finished project.

I just want to see other models work before we test them out on the most vulnerable.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

It's been quite a week. Since the publication of my Al Jazeera America piece on the cult of compliance, I've done a bunch of press, written a few new essays, prepped for the start of classes (tomorrow!), and pitched some long-term projects. More news on that when there's news.

I was so swarmed with topics that I never even blogged about my latest from the Chronicle of Higher Education - "Don't Speak Out, the message of the Salaita Affair." For those not following, Steven Salaita is a professor who tweeted many angry things about Israel this summer, right when he was moving to Illinois. The Chancellor invoked a rarely (or never) used clause in his contract to void the hire. A huge amount of legal and rhetorical wrangling has followed, and I do think this case reveals conflicting visions for the future of the university. Or, perhaps, the Chancellor is lying, and it's just about Israel. I wrote:

I come to this topic not as a partisan in the specifics of Salaita’s situation but as an advocate for faculty engagement with the public. Over the last year, I have written periodic columns for The Chronicle about the ways that academics can and should write for general audiences. Recently, I even suggested that "sustained public engagement" of any sort should count for hiring, tenure, and promotion.When I write about this topic, I often get told that the real problem is that academics are snobs. We like living in an ivory tower, goes the argument, and we look with disdain on getting our hands dirty in the public sphere. There’s plenty of snobbery to go around, it’s true, but the Salaita affair shows a different, and I think more powerful, force that keeps many academics from commenting on important contemporary issues: fear.

For more on this topic, I recommend Corey Robin's blog, where he's been active in collecting arguments and organizing action. I will likely have more to say on the topic as we go forward, as it relates to corporatization and public engagement, two of my "beats."

I had a couple of pieces on the #cultofcompliance (hey look, a hashtag. You could use it on twitter!) - Two reactions to my writing from New York writers, a comparison of the police in Chicago during the NATO riots and those in Ferguson, and then a blog on Kajieme Powell. I wrote - it's possible that police needed to kill Powell, but I have some questions. As I've learned more in the days that followed, it's more and more clear that the police put themselves in a position in which killing Powell was the only option. I will have a CNN piece on this tomorrow (probably).

I talk about Nico escaping from the house, or seeming to, and my babysitter calling the police. As I write about police violence, these are the stakes for me and my family on a personal level. We need the police to be better on disability issues.

Finally, I wrote a post on "The pencil test" for disability, in which I talk about Takei, Bieber, and Tampa Police throwing a quadriplegic out of his wheelchair to see how disabled he really was.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

The apartheid government of South Africa had a problem (well, it had a lot of them, but bear with me). It wanted to discriminate by race, but how does one deal with mixed-race people? It came up with the infamous "pencil test," in which a pencil is pushed through a person's hair, and how easily it emerges determines the classification. The pencil test is penetrative, with overtones of the state's control over black bodies medically, sexually, and in so many other ways. For me, it's always been a symbol of the whole evil apartheid construct.

It's been on my mind lately because of a broad discussion about disability and fakery. How disabled must a person be to qualify as "disabled" under the law? Being disabled comes with certain civil rights protections. Being disabled to a certain degree entitles one to a check from Social Security every month. Being disabled, as Justin Bieber knows, can enable one to skip lines at Disneyworld (instead of linking to Gawker or TMZ, why not read the great Emily Ladau on Bieber). Being disabled, in the eyes of the abled world anyway, comes with advantages (great parking!), sympathy (oh, your son is cute), and money.

This is, of course, nonsense and tracks to the ways that other privileged groups envy the perceived benefits of those who experience discrimination. In the disability world, this often tracks to "how disabled are you really?"

We saw it recently with George Takei's ill-conceived posting of a picture showing a woman standing on her wheelchair to get down a bottle of alcohol in the grocery store. The caption, "There's been a miracle in the alcohol isle," suggested that this woman wasn't /really/ that disabled if she could stand on the wheelchair to get some booze. Disability advocates protested and Takei initially told them to lighten up, which is the first response of so many comedians when called on humor that replicates stereotypes. I was first alerted to it by a friend who can walk about 100 feet before using her wheelchair, and she told me that she lives in fear of being accused of faking and having to defend her disabled state.

There were a /lot/ of articles about the meme and Takei. I thought this one from Scott Jordan Harris at Slate was especially good when he offered an alaternative read of the scene. He wrote:

The picture does not show fraud. What it shows is a disabled person using a tool—her wheelchair—to live independently. If any judgement is to be made about the photo at all, it should be celebrated for showing that independence."

Eventually, Takei apologized, at length and sincerely, and the story faded.

I'm writing about this because a 2008 story just made its way to my feeds. I've been working hard on the issue of disability and police violence, but I don't claim to have a master database or anything like a total set of examples. In 2008, my son was one and I was just beginning to apply my training as an academic to disability issues. I wasn't even on Facebook yet.

Here's the story and the post. In it, a cop doesn't believe that someone arrested on a traffic violation is /really/ disabled, so he decides to conduct his own test, dumping him on the floor (and breaking some ribs). This is the extreme case, but it's the same as the Takei meme in its origins (eventually there was an apology and probably a lawsuit).
Our language and our actions around disability and fraud matter. They ripple through the culture, shaping behaviors and ideas beyond. Language - comedy memes - have power.

Friday, August 22, 2014

As most of you know, last week Al Jazeera America published my essay on the "cult of compliance," something I've been working on for a long time. Thanks to everyone who read it and shared it. The response has been thoughtful and wide-ranging, just as I would have hoped.

Today I am sharing two pieces by other journalists who use my concept to draw connections for their own subject.

First, Matt Zoller Seitz, at New York Magazine, writes "Watching Ferguson in the Stream." It's a piece that's really about the consequences of watching violence, real violence, rather than the fictionalized violence that already dominates our airwaves. He writes [my emphasis]::

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes... put it last night, “You end up expecting drama from these situations, because everything is always heading toward a heightening point.” Al Jazeera America’s David M. Perry described the clashes between police and citizens in Ferguson as an example of “the cult of compliance” that has normalized state violence against unarmed U.S. citizens. “The significance of the events in Missouri extends beyond the very real and terrible pattern of police killings of African-American men. It is an intensification of years of cultural shift in which law enforcement and other authority figures have increasingly treated noncompliance as a reason to initiate violence.”

Noncompliance can mean anything from a young man resisting a policeman’s order to move from the street to the sidewalk — the inciting incident that, we’re told, might have ended in the shooting death of Michael Brown — to a reporter understandably chafing at police edicts to stay penned into a particular area or turn off his lights and cameras. The cult of compliance was on display during the Occupy protests — remember the UC Davis pepper-spray incident? — but there’s something singularly unsettling about watching it rumble through the flat streets of a small Missouri town, its streetlights and signage blurred by tear gas.

Obviously, I agree with Seitz' analysis (read the whole thing!). He talks about the disjunction when there's a cutesy internet meme on feed right next to the picture of someone having milk poured in their eyes because of gas. He notes that we're a culture screaming about First Amendment rights every time someone calls for a boycott of a rude website, but that now we're seeing what real state media control feels like. A reporter was overheard saying, "An officer put his weapon in my face and threatened to shoot me if I didn’t quote-unquote get the fuck out of here." Compliance runs deep and wide, and it's on display in every aspect of the Ferguson story.

Meanwhile, over at Brooklyn Magazine, Phillip Pantuso has linked the Ferguson to Rikers using the cult of compliance as one of his analytical tools. I'm pleased to see this, because one of the essays I couldn't get published in July did exactly the same thing. It took Ferguson to make my "cult of compliance" framework seem true to mainstream media editors, I suppose.

He writes:

If recent events in Ferguson are any indication, something like a culture of violence has permeated some of America’s local police departments, too. Cops and prison guards occupy different places on the hierarchy of corrections enforcement, but the primary interactions of both groups are with similar populations: the poor, the mentally-ill, and the non-white. In Ferguson, the majority-white police force has mishandled not only an encounter with a young black man but with the scores of majority-African-American protestors who’ve demonstrated in the aftermath of that man’s murder.

He then quotes a key line from my piece, and continues:

The consequences of this are not felt equally. The cops have weapons of war and the psychological empowerment that comes with them; the prison guards have a code of silence and institutional advantage, a tacit reinforcement of power and privilege that serves to Other the inmates under their keep. The people of Ferguson have tweets, photos, video, and rapidly-eroding Constitutional rights.

The note that this is not felt equally is very important. The cult of compliance coordinates events, it's a way of seeing links and trying to identify root causes (always plural), rather than focusing on symptoms. But the consequences fall heavily on, as he says, "the poor, the mentally-ill, the non-white."

A week after my piece went live, I am more sure than ever that the cult of compliance provides a useful conceptual tool to unpack the ways in which we are slouching towards soft authoritarianism. We can stop this slide.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Today, the disability social webs are packed with irate tweets, posts, essays, and diatribes against Richard Dawkins. I'm not linking to his twitter account or the reports, but he said that the only moral decision was to abort foetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, that such wasn't eugenics, and otherwise ranted on for hours.

I'm glad you all are on the case and pushing back. There's nothing with that. I am not criticizing anyone for tweeting, writing, or posting about him. I'm just not going to engage with the content of his tweets, because basically, he's trolling us.

I don't want to talk about it. What I want you to do is to read this Amanda Marcotte essay on Dawkins' recent comments on rape. Dawkins is saying, "I'm just explaining a principle," and the interweb goes crazy. Here's what she wrote [my emphasis]:

This is bad writing, if Dawkins was setting out to create clear-cut examples of the principle he’s trying to illustrate. When explaining a principle, it’s unwise to go straight for examples that the public is legitimately confused about because other people are trying to muddy the waters. A concise, clear writer would do what I did, which is use clear examples to illuminate, instead of clawing at something that is actually contentious in our culture.

Of course, Dawkins is not actually a bad writer. This was not a mistake. Dawkins picked rape and pedophilia not because he’s trying to clarify a principle, but because he is needling his feminist critics who were angry with him for statements where he seemed to imply that there’s a “correct” amount of hurt to suffer from a specific incident of sexual abuse, which could easily be read as the suggestion that people who had serious trauma reactions to what he considers “mild” incidents are somehow wrong to feel how they feel.

This is the analogy that I think is useful to understand Dawkins. He takes an idea and promotes in the way that will generate the most noise. He is fully aware that by saying these comments about Down syndrome, he will spark mass controversy. Parents, self-advocates, disability writers will go nuts, pitch op-eds, post pictures of their beautiful kids, and say, "this life is worth living!." And damn right, it is.

But we don't need to engage someone who is basically trolling us. Block, mute, ignore and make the argument about life with disability for its own sake, not in the context of Dawkins. This is not a troll that I, at any rate, want to feed.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

At about 9:30 AM yesterday I got a series of texts from my babysitter. She had been tidying toys with my daughter in one of the rooms, and suddenly Nico, my son, was gone. She and Ellie searched the house, looked outside, and gradually panicked. They called the cops. They ran around. They shouted. They found Nico sitting inside the back door with dirty feet. The police showed up and everything was fine.

I did three things. I reassured my babysitter that it was ok, that it had happened to me, and that I would take steps. I called a handyman to install door chains so we can better secure our home .

Later, I called the police to talk about registering my son with them. I need to send them a picture, some ideas about where he might go if he were lost, ways of interacting with him, and so forth. I felt re-assured.

There's some irony here. I've been writing for a year about police violence and disability, usually in tones highly critical of police actions. In the meantime, I'm relying on the police to help take care of my son in case he wanders.

And that's the point. I write about police violence and disability BECAUSE my son is vulnerable to all kinds of dangers, and I need them to be there for him.
Those are the stakes.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Today St. Louis police shot a man with a knife. He had been acting erratically, police showed up, he raised the knife and said shoot me now, so they did. Read more about it here.

The officers ordered the man to get down, according to Dotson. The man, 23, became more agitated and walked toward them, reaching for his waistband. Witnesses told police the man was yelling "Shoot me, kill me now," during the encounter.

The officers drew their weapons and ordered the man to stop. He did stop, but then pulled out a knife and came at the officers with it held up high, Dotson said. They ordered him to stop and drop the knife. When he got within two or three feet of the officers, they fired, killing the man.
“This is a lethal range for a knife,” Dotson said.
...
Several in the crowd asked why police did not use tasers to bring down the subject. Dotson said police officers have the right to defend themselves when an agitated man is coming at them with a knife. Said the chief, “Officers have a reasonable expectation to go home at the end of their shift.”

Here are some early thoughts. This is another case of police shooting a black man in St. Louis. The intersection with disability, though, is where I want to focus now.

Could a real journalist on the ground ask Dotson about Crisis Intervention Team training (CIT) in St. Louis. Did these officers have it? Do any officers in the area have it. Do the officers understand that there are techniques for addressing mental illness-related situations that do not involve shooting. I wrote about some of them with Lawrence Carter-Long here.

A man at close range with a knife justifies the use of lethal force. These officers will quickly get off paid leave and go back to work. But note the situation. The officers say, "Stop." Man with psychatric disability hoping to get killed by police does not stop. So the officers say, "Stop." The only way out is death. The only path to life is not to draw your weapons and advance.

I don't know all the details, yet, but I'd very much like to know about the disability aspects here. Because here's a tweet from a USAToday journalist:

Eyewitness says people on the street were screaming to police officers that the man killed had mental health problems.
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) August 19, 2014

The officers have the right not to be stabbed and to use lethal force. What they also have the right to do, if no one else was in jeopardy, is to take a different approach to a known mental health situation.

I am on a deadline but I don't want to let the morning slip away without these images.

During the recent NATO meeting in Chicago, there was plenty of violence. Google NATO POLICE CHICAGO and you will see truncheons, blood, arrests, and angry statements about police states. Here's a typical picture.

There are no semi-automatic rifles pointed at protestors. It's not nearly as terrifying as what we're seeing in Ferguson, MO.

Once these rifles are out, everything changes.

That's not an excuse for the Chicago PD, which has certainly had its problems dealing with peaceful protests (as well as its own history of police brutality). But I'm struck by the ways in which this is a suburban

story.

Watch these 60 seconds or so from Jake Tapper @CNN. He looks at the protestors, peaceful, calm. He looks at the massive police presence. "It doesn't make any sense!" he says. And that's right, it doesn't ... unless you understand that the goal here is about enforcing compliance. Then it makes lots of sense.

I just want to show you this, Don. I just want to show you this, okay?
This is just give you an idea of what's going on. The protesters—here's
this main intersection—the protesters have moved all the way down there.
They're about half a block down. Here, Don, watch with me. They're all
the way down there. Okay? Nobodies threatening anything, nobodies doing
anything, none of the stores here that I can see are being looted.
There's no violence. Now I want you to look at what is going on in
Ferguson, Missouri, in downtown America. Okay? These are armed police.
With machine, not machine guns, with semi-automatic rifles, with batons,
with shields, many of them dressed for combat. Now why they're doing
this, I don't know because there is no threat going on here, none [pointing to protesters] that merits this [pointing to police line].
There is none. Okay? Absolutely there has been looters, absolutely over
the last nine days there has been violence, but there is nothing going
on, on this street right now, that merits this scene out of Bagram.
Nothing. So if people wonder why the people of Ferguson, Missouri, are
so upset, this is part of the reason. What is this? [gesturing to police line] This doesn't make any sense.

Monday, August 18, 2014

[Content Note: Ableist Speech including use of the "r-word." Later, I quote a passage from Huckleberry Finn that contains the n-word.]

This post works with a 1996 piece from David Sedaris and This American Life that contains terrible depictions of the intellectually disabled. It was re-broadcast in 2013. I'd like to see content notes on this episode. Here are my questions.

Can the trigger warning open up conversation, preserve texts that contain prejudicial language, and be a pathway to communication? When something from the past contains speech that now is widely deemed offensive, what do we do? I argue that the content note or trigger warning is a pathway towards preserving dialogue, preserving material, as it offers a middle ground between banning and shrugging.

The post is long, but you can just go read the storify of about 12 tweets that summarized the whole thing, with my conversation partner David quoted with permission.

For those just joining me ...

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for CNN about an episode of This American Life featuring Wyatt Cenac. He compared a drug episode to having adult-onset Down syndrome, which I didn't like for reasons I explain. To my surprise, we connected over Twitter, then talked for a long time on the phone (summarized at link). I came away thinking that he's an enormously thoughtful person about comedy, discourse, prejudice, and representation. He's now, actually, a guy I hope I could go to first to ask for smart thoughts about the complexities of humor. I hope he still takes my emails when this kind of thing comes up again (as it will).

One of the things I argued in the piece is that perhaps we, in the disability community, focus too much on the r-word over the issues of representation that such language reflects. I'm calling for a broader engagement on such questions beyond the single word. So, naturally, here's a piece about the r-word.

The next day, another father wrote me about his experience in 2013 hearing a re-broadcast of the 1996 "The Santaland Diaries," the enormously successful radio adaption of David Sedaris' tale of being an elf at Santa-land. It's a story of loathing for others and self, and includes this section:

At noon, a large group of retarded people came to visit Santa and passed me on my little island. These people were profoundly retarded. They were rolling their eyes and wagging their tongues and staggering towards Santa. It was a large group of retarded people and, after seeing them for 15 minutes, I could not begin to guess where the retarded people ended and the regular New Yorkers began. Everyone looks retarded once you've set your mind to it.

Here are a few opening points.

First: this is MUCH WORSE than Cenac's joke. Cenac knew his story required explanation, tried to provide it in a way that explained he knew there was no such thing as adult-onset Down syndrome. He wanted to be true to his experience with pot, the actual words he thought at the time, without offending ... well ... me and those like me. What was interesting to me was that, as a listener and parent of a child with Down syndrome, the explanation failed to change the meaning of the bit. I wrote about it because I think these gray areas, these complexities, are exactly where we need to explore. If he had just made a lot of r-word jokes, there would have been no story there other than: Comedian offends to try and get a laugh. And that's not a story.

My question for the CNN piece was how Gervais' "it's not about disability" or Cenac's "I know this is not how Down syndrome works" play into the world of disability and representation. Although I regret that Cenac got a lot of grief on twitter over it (and called for it to stop), and I wish we had been able to speak before hand, I stand by my experience as a listener to the bit. I also accept Cenac's articulation of his intentions and find them reasonable. I think just a shade more context, a few more minutes of time, something, might have really changed the nature of that story.

But in Santaland, Sedaris is deliberately using this kind of language in order to say, ultimately, that New Yorkers at Santaland all seem retarded to him. He is using the most stereotypical descriptions possible in order to get that laugh. Rolling eyes. Wagging tongues.

Second: This was recorded in 1996 and written some time before. The word "retard" was already objectionable then, but had not achieved the kind of wide-spread cultural rejection as it had by 2013. We have made progress. In 1996, it was not reasonable for a parent to expect to avoid the r-word altogether. Here, though, I don't expect to hear someone saying it directly at my son, but rather as the casual self-or-other insult that teens use. And even that is fading generationally. So far, I have only heard it used to describe people with intellectual disabilities directly when voiced by an older person who learned to say "mentally retarded" as the correct, polite, non-insulting language. I rarely correct such cases.

So Sedaris was, to my reading, deliberately mocking the disabled in order to mock New Yorkers. He used a term that had not become a universal pejorative at the time, but I think he recognized the cruelty of the humor because his comedy depends on loathing. Principally, he claims the rhetoric of self-loathing; given that, he can loathe all others with impunity. It's obviously worked very well for him as a writing strategy.

But let's give him and Ira Glass the full benefit of the doubt and say that in 1996, no reasonable media personality would have thought this was objectionable. Maybe a little mean, but totally fair game. I hope everyone will agree that in 2013 (or now), no reasonable person would NOT think this is objectionable and offensive. The offense is now evident.

Third: As I recounted in my blog, here's what the father who heard the re-broadcast in 2013 wrote:

I cannot explain my reaction to hearing this in any other way than to say that I felt like I was punched in the gut. I suddenly could not breathe, I had to pull over the side of the road, I turned off the radio, and then I cried. I cried so hard because I have been waiting for this moment for 6 years. I have been waiting for someone to overtly make a discriminatory comment that shook me to my core.

THIS IS WHAT BEING TRIGGERED LOOKS LIKE.

Moreover, that someone would be triggered like this was predictable. I'm glad I didn't hear it without warning.

What I asked Ira Glass, in an email that was not answered (I'm a nobody; and since he wouldn't comment for the CNN piece, he's certainly not going to spend any time on me for my blog. Busy man, I know), was what obligations the radio host had when presenting material from the past. I wanted to know what kinds of conversations and decisions they made. Whether they would just broadcast a show like this forever, or would it expire someday? How do they make those decisions?

I went back and looked at other issues in the This American Life catalog, which is of course both vast and available online. I just did a search for the word "warning." I do not claim this is

Here are some interesting sentences:

Episode 458 - "Play the Part" - "A warning to listeners that this is a story that's partly about race, and a racial slur gets used."

Episode 341 - "How to Talk to Kids" - "A warning to listeners, we don't get very explicit in this discussion, but we do acknowledge that people, and teenagers, have sex."

Episode 404 - "Enemy Camp 2010" - "A quick warning for listeners before we begin. This story acknowledges the existence of sex."

Episode 457 - "What I did for Love" - "A warning, I should say, before we go any further in this story. We're going to acknowledge the existence of sex between adults. Nothing explicit."

From a Facebook post of theirs last August 11, on pedophilia: "Warning: the article includes some graphic descriptions of abuse."

Episode 119 - "Lockup" - "A warning before we start. This reading contains material that may not be appropriate for some younger listeners. There is no explicit language or graphic depictions of anything, but it does acknowledge the existence of certain sex acts."

Hey there, podcast listeners, Ira here. So there's some cursing in this week's show, and we're not going to beep it here on the podcast and internet version of the show. If you prefer a beeped version of our program, like we do on the radio, that's great. Go to our website, thisamericanlife.org, and you can download it from there.

This thing about not beeping the words is something we've tried a few times here on the internet. And we're not sure how often we should do it, or if we should keep doing it. We would love to hear what you think. If you have an opinion about this, email us at web@thislife.org, and it would help us a lot to sort these emails out if you put in the subject header, Beep Yes, or Beep No, in the subject line. OK, Beep Yes or Beep No. I think that's pretty simple. I think you understand which one goes with which one you feel. I'm not going to say anything more about that. OK. Here is today's show.

Then Glass says [my emphasis]:

A quick trigger warning, for anybody who needs a trigger warning, that this story does include descriptions of incidents of violence against women.

That's a fascinating aside, right? At least if you've been apart of the whole trigger warning debate (too many links to even start. Just go google it. Here's something I wrote in which I am opposed to TW policies but say that good teaching requires informing students about content.), this kind of aside shows that the folks at This American Life are, right now, trying to figure out what to do about the triggering material of their show.

Let me go on record again to say, basically, that I am a fan of the show. I don't listen to all of every episode. But when they get a great story, they do it right - funny, sad, thoughtful, etc. They can be great.

There is no trigger warning on The Santaland Diaries. I'd like to hear from Ira Glass and the other producers whether that might change. What is the process for deciding these things?

One argument against trigger warnings, one I've in fact made, is that trauma is so specific that you never can tell what might trigger one person or another. Content notes, therefore, are a better model. You say - here is the content, as best you can, and let people decide as they might. I think, though, that in 2013 it is impossible to listen to that David Sedaris passage and not think - whoa, something is wrong here, maybe we need to warn people.
This is not a new problem. Here's Huckleberry Finn, chapter 6, the voice of "Pap."

Here was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awful- est old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. (6.11)

So that's pretty complicated to read. But it's in a great work of literature, it reflects a voice of the time, and anyone who argues that Huck Finn should be banned is, well, wrong. But no one should just have it handed to them without some contextualization, right?

The Santaland Diaries is not Huck Finn. It's also not a minstrel show, though, in which the premise of the material relies on racism. We don't broadcast "Little Black Sambo." We don't show Disney's "Song of the South." We don't show overtly racist material - material that is about projecting racism - without very good reason in highly specific contexts. We do read Mark Twain.

So where does this leave us?

I do not believe that in 2013 you can broadcast a show with Sedaris' brand of speech there without a content warning. The trigger was predictable. The problem with such speech is widely known across American culture (and of course beyond). I don't think you have to cut it - though I would, as the joke is fundamentally, rather than incidentally, demeaning to the disabled.

The trigger warning, therefore, emerges as a pathway towards preserving content, preserving material as its language ages our of the mainstream into the widely and wildly offensive. Because without the trigger warning, well, then I have to advocate that this never be aired again.

Thank you so much to everyone who read and shared my work, as I think this is a vital lens going forward.

In the wake of Ferguson, it's been hard to follow other stories, although I wrote various essays that mostly didn't get published or picked up thanks to the dominance of this one, crucial, story (and its thousands of related stories). I'll hope to bring some back up soon.

Finally, some resources on the firing of Steven Salaita from Illinois. This is the one story from the week that I want to elevate into a national conversation about academic freedom and blacklisting. I'll try again next week. It's not about the content of his tweets, is that no one should be fired for tweeting like this, especially not without due process. The university matters and we have to protect its freedoms.

Friday, August 15, 2014

As regular readers know, I have been talking this for a long time and thinking about police violence in various ways for even longer. I used the phrase for the first time on this post from August 17, 2013. The post cites Digby and Bruce Schneier, two great writers on different aspects of privacy and civil liberty, but emerged from my frustration I was frustrated by my inability to land the story with a major publication. I wrote:

I've been trying to write about non-compliance and police violence to no avail, so far. I'm not sure what's not catching editors' eyes about my various essays (and soon I'll just start posting them here), as I think there's a very big story happening before us, but we get distracted by tasers, by drones, by tanks, by SWAT, by racial profiling, by guns, by all the VERY REAL and very troubling symptoms of deep problems in American police culture. I call it the Cult of Compliance, in which police demand instant compliance or feel free (and unaccountable) to respond with force.

Little did I know that it would take another year and police takeover of Ferguson, MO, to get the story out there. I hope the piece does it justice and that it influences the discourse. I think it's so important to acknowledge the specifics of each case - racism, sexism, ableism, classism, whatever factors create a violent incident - but also to see the patterns.

Here's some of the thinking behind the "cult" language. I could have said a culture of compliance, or a culture that doesn't accept non-compliance, or any number of other ways of framing the problem. Cult, though, implies an unthinking adherence to an idea, principle, group, prophet or deity that you must venerate at all costs. To me, in our police culture but also our American culture more broadly, we venerate compliance. It's not just the police to blame, but all of us who accept the "he/she didn't comply" rationale in any given case.

Here are some of the stories I didn't reference in the "AJAM" article.

The stories include a boy attacked for a "dehumanizing stare." I wrote about a mentally ill man shot at in Times Square because he was endangering himself by running in traffic. Later, the police charged him as responsible for the people the police themselves shot. Then there was Jonathan Ferrell who was hurt in a car crash and ran towards police looking for help, addled from the crash. They said stop. He didn't, so they shot and killed him.

In Connecticut, a deaf boy was escaping from abusive custody. Police crept up behind him and tased him, not even risking non-compliance. He sued and that's the last I've been able to find about the story.

Schools, like the one in CT, are a major site for the cult of compliance. Here's a boy with Down syndrome dragged across the floor for being "defiant." I haven't even written about the horrors of the Judge Rothenberg Center and their electric shocks for non-compliant kids with autism, though it's been sitting in my draft folder for months.

Gilberto Powell, a man with Down syndrome, given "multiple commands" and then beaten when he didn't comply.

A couple of college girls buying bottled water in Virginia. The cops thought it was beer and, without ID, charged. The girls panicked. Later, a spokesman said, "This whole unfortunate incident could have been avoided had the occupants complied with law enforcement requests."

There are so many more, and I'm not even attempting to document all incidents that might fit. That's not the goal of the blog. Policestateusa.com, for example, documents more.

My goal is to provide the conceptual links that pull these incidents together. We can only treat the problem when we identify it and call it out. The solution - laws, regulations, and trainings that do not focus on one class of people or another, but that offer simple rules:

1. Non-compliance does not justify violence.

2. Inconvenience or impatience does not justify violence.

3. All use of all types of weapons or hands constitutes violence.

4. In a few well-defined circumstances, non-compliance may justify a citation, a ticket, a warning, even an arrest. But it does not justify violence.

As I discuss in the Al-Jazeera piece, the Department of Justice is now looking into police culture with the broadest scope in decades. We need to watch this and make sure that they reach conclusions and make recommendations that will treat the disease, that will fight the cult of compliance, not just work on symptoms.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Alison Piepmeier is a pretty awesome person, by all reports. I don't know her personally, but someday I hope to change that. Here are some things that I do know.

She is the director of the Women's and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston, the awesome place that had every Freshman read "Fun Home," by Alison Bechdel, much to the dismay of homophobic lawmakers in the state. You can read about the controversy here (by Piepmeier).

She is the mother of a daughter with Down syndrome, named Maybelle.

She writes about parenting for outlets such as Motherlode. This essay, in particular, embodies the pro-information approach that I also write about.

I don't really know what else to say to get you to donate, if you can, and to get you to share this story across your social media feeds. You can read Alison's blog here in which she offers her thoughts, her gratitude, her embarrassment, her worries, her loves. It's quite something and worth your time.

If you have the means, please help a little.

Every time I write a post, anywhere from 100-4000 of people read it. If 100 of you donated 10$, it would go a long way. And if you can't, please consider sharing the message.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

A few weeks ago, I wrote a well-read blog post about girls and science. Apparently, we're still debating whether it's nuture or nature that drives women to choose professions other than science.

Two recent pieces in the national media provide more evidence for the ways that women get driven out of the scientific profession, as well as the continued questions of the meaning of that evidence.

First, from the New York Times, a piece on harassment in science. It begins with the author relating her experience (a senior prof booking a hotel room with only one bed for the two of them), then continues:

I’d forgotten about this experience from two decades ago until I read a report published July 16 in the journal PLOS One. Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and three colleagues used email and social media to invite scientists to fill out an online questionnaire about their experiences with harassment and assault at field sites; they received 666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology.

Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors. Very few respondents said their field site had a code of conduct or sexual harassment policy, and of the 78 who had dared to report incidents, fewer than 20 percent were satisfied with the outcome.

Fieldwork, it is clear, is a dangerous place to be a woman. It's also where you make your break your career and take your first steps. The piece ends with a powerful call for clear standards, pre-emptive anti-harassment policies, and most of all, people to be willing to call out their friends and colleagues. We cannot rely on the victim of harassment to challenge the system herself.

Over the course of three years Nadya Fouad, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, surveyed 5,300 women who earned engineering degrees within the past six decades in order to figure out why so few stayed in engineering. Fouad reported that only 62 percent of respondents were currently working in engineering. Those who left the field provided their reasons for doing so in the survey.

"It's the climate, stupid!" she said during her presentation, referring to the "old-boys club" workplaces that she says still exist in many engineering organizations.

Respondents in her study reflected her sentiments, with many calling the engineering workplace unfriendly and even hostile to women. They also said that they felt many of these companies did not provide opportunities for women like them to advance and develop.

"Women's departure from engineering is not just an issue of 'leaning in.' " said Fouad, lead researcher of the study. "It's about changing the work environment."

Changing the work environment, not just individual women taking action. What I thought was especially important, if depressing, was this response to her work:

Not everyone agrees with Fouad's findings.
"Women aren't leaving engineering to go and hide in a corner. They are leaving for many reasons which a study like this may not find," said Elizabeth Bierman, president of the Society of Women Engineers and an aerospace engineer for 20 years. "The work environment may be one reason but for the majority it is not the case."
Her organization recently conducted its own retention study and found that although women do leave the engineering workplace faster than men, they do so for a variety of reasons. Many of those reasons, such as lack of a work/life balance, also resonate with men, Bierman said.
The bigger problem facing women and engineering, she said, is getting more women into the engineering pipeline. Bierman says companies looking to retain both women and men should improve their work/life balance policies.
"We've found that women stay in engineering because they want to make sure they are making a difference," she says. "If women feel they are making that difference, retention levels will be higher."

Yes, make a difference. And how do they make a difference?

Well, first we have to change the climate so that women's work is valued, women are protected from harassment (oh, the stories I have heard from a few aerospace engineer friends, now all working in other fields), and we change the culture.

Choice is fine. Choice is stressed by everyone defending the lack of women in sciences. But when the pressure is coming at women through harassment, through bias, through diminishing women's work, through all the factors we know that run rampant in our patriarchal society, there is no real choice. You either go with the flow and find something else to do, or spend your life spitting into the wind (warning, mixing metaphors!). It's no surprise so many women drop out.

To end on a good note, for the first time in 80 years, the winner of the Fields Medal in mathematics, the "Nobel prize" for the discipline, is a woman! May there be so many more that it's no longer news.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

I've been thinking a lot about medieval slavery, lately, especially in Venice (the place I study). I'm interested in commodity and the movement of objects, but unfree people are mostly invisible in my texts. I know they are there, because I know something about the medieval Mediterranean economy, but they aren't appearing in my sources (which are mostly religious, not economic. Other forms of commodity appear though). Venice, over time, will become a major player in the Mediterranean slave trade and I'm interested in seeing how that emerges in the culture.

Yesterday, via this piece on slavery today, I began thinking about the invisible nature of slavery for so many people in the western world. The piece opens:

The average price of a slave has decreased during the past 200 years, according to Kevin Bales, a leading abolitionist who has written several books about modern-day slavery.In 1809, the average price of a slave was $40,000 when adjusted to today’s money. In 2009, the average price of a slave was $90, Bales says.

The pieces leads to http://slaveryfootprint.org/, which includes an app allowing you to go through your life and figure out about how much slave labor is involved in your life. For my family of four, the answer was 60.

I don't how their app works, how accurate they are, but as they say:

So, how many slaves work for you? “If you took 100 smartphones and lined them up, we could tell you with near 100 percent probability that on average, each one of those phones had at least 3.2 people exploited in the making of the phone,” said Dillon. “Mine might have had zero, yours might have had ten, but that’s not the point.”

So yeah, it might not really be 60, it might be 30, or 90. But it's not zero. And I don't know their definition of "slave," but as a historian, I also know that doesn't matter. Degrees of unfree can vary, and do, over time.

We are all complicit in modern slave labor and there's no real way to live in the globalized world and not benefit from it. The only solution, as far as I can tell, is to push companies to be aware of their supply chains and to demand more equitable labor practices.

Monday, August 11, 2014

For my non-academic readers, over the last week there's been a big story about academic freedom in the age of Twitter. An arab-American professor lost a job, it seems, because he was rude about Israel on Twitter. There's lots to say here and I am working on several essays. Here are some resources.

First, on the firing, then some reactions (there are lots and lots more), and then the ways that conservative media write about conservative professors who encounter, they say, prejudice for their political beliefs.

As always with these resource posts, please let me know what I missed either in comments (which work better now), facebook, twitter, or email. Thanks.

Looking at survey data from all of higher education’s primary constituencies, I began to realize that Republicans and conservatives, while vastly outnumbered in academia, were, for the most part, successful, happy, and prosperous. Fewer than 2 percent of faculty (Republican or Democratic) reported being the victims of unfair treatment based on their politics. Only 7 percent of Republican faculty believed that discrimination against those with “right-wing” views was a serious problem on their campus, compared with 8 percent of Democratic faculty who expressed concerns about discrimination against those with “left-wing” views. Asked to consider what they would do if given the opportunity to “begin your career again,” 91 percent of Democratic faculty and 93 percent of Republican faculty answered that they would “definitely” or “probably” want to be a college professor. Similarly, few rightleaning students or administrators claimed to have been the victims of political mistreatment. Like their Democratic counterparts, most were satisfied with their experience in higher education.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

This week I wrote about Down syndrome in two context: abortion issues and comedy. Many thousands of people read my CNN piece on Down syndrome and comedy. I am deeply impressed by Wyatt Cenac's willingness to call me and talk at length about the bit and his approach to comedy. To me, it's what resolution looks like, even if NPR is unlikely to take the piece down (as requested by the parent who alerted me to the issue). I like resolution, in part because it's so rare.

Earlier in the week, I got a comment from a reader that she wouldn't waste time thinking before she aborted a fetus with Down syndrome. I offered the best response that I could, suggesting some ways that this type of eugenic principle ought to be rethought.

Finally, a Hamas spokesman recycled the medieval Blood Libel myth on Al Quds, the Lebanese TV station. He said, "we remember," and then "it's a fact," on a station dedicated to the memory of Islamic Jerusalem. As a medieval historian of memory and myth, I was horrified, but thought it was important to comment.